Hi every one! Like I said in the last video, I want to try something new in this year and this is a tip video for beginners. I’m not a pro by any means and I’m just sharing what I found so please just think of it like advice from your friend. And the first one is a basic straight cutting with chisels and a bowtie inlay as a practice. It’s not as difficult as you think and I’ll share with you how to avoid potential mistakes. I’ll use these chisels and this drill to make the mortise and use this hand plane to clean. First thing I want to highlight is the resistance & force created by a chisel. A chisel, of course has a bevel so when you line up your flat side of the chisel on a marking line to cut straight, the chisel moves out of the line because of the resistance. To avoid it, I usually pound 1/16 -1/8” away on the waste side from the marking line first and then cut it on the line. In this way, the waste side has a room to move when cutting on the marking line and you get a clean line. This is very important technique to initiate a clean fabrication and avoid tear out on the edge. The next thing is slicing a waste. When you clean up the waste on the marking line, you should slice it off a little by little. I’m using only ¼” of 1” wide chisel and repeat the same process until I reach the other end of the wood. The previous cutting section will guide your chisel to go straight down. I usually reduce the thickness of the slice and use whole chisel blade for a clean finish. When there is a good amount of the thickness until the marking line, you can use a mallet but still don’t try to remove a lot at a time unless you know how well your chisel can cut or the fibers inside the board will break. The good thing is, if you can do well on these 2 techniques, you’ll most likely have a clean mortise for a bowtie inlay. Now, cutting the bowtie. For me, I don’t have a band saw so cutting this bowtie is a lot more difficult than cutting a perfect mortise but here is about a chisel practice so I’ll skip how to cut the bowtie. Please just be sure all 4 sides of the bowtie are square. Ok, Let’s work on the mortise. First, I put a dub of CA glue on a bowtie and put it on where I want to embed this bowtie. The grain has to be perpendicular. Now I use an xacto knife but I think a marking knife or one with a thicker blade works better. As long as you can see the line, you don’t have to score it strongly. Here’re two tips. If you really want a clean finish, don’t overrun a knife at the outside corners or you may have a tiny break out. On the other hand, you should be clearly marking the inside
corners. This is very important to have a well defined bowtie. The next tip is, not necessarily you really do but you should have an intention to mark under the bowtie like the picture. The mortise can run a small side like 1/64" – 1/128" inside the outline of an actual bowtie. Then, like I mentioned, I’ll pound about 1/16” inside of the marking line by chisels. This distance depends on a material, chisel width or pound strength but you’ll find the right amount. Then I push my chisel on the actual marking line to cut like 1/32" deep. You can pound the chisel but I just didn’t think I needed to. Now, remove the waste by a drill driver. If you want to reduce the chisel work, you can draw lines like me to be sure you bore out the waste efficiently. I usually do this when I don’t want to mess up. In addition, please be sure to use a forstner bit or brad point bit. I suck at using a drill driver so I put a painter’s tape to control the depth but it doesn’t usually go well. Then, I work on cleaning the mess. First, I will work on connecting all the holes. This one, as there were lot materials in between, I used a mallet but I did most of them by just hand pressure. Rather than going from the side way to hit it, it’s always good to cut it like V shape that reduces the resistance. It always works better for me. After connecting all of them, I will need to work on cutting fibers until the inside line. You always need to cut the fibers across the grain first for a clean finish. Here, I use a mallet as it has still good enough amount of material left to the final line. At this moment, I’m also finding if there is a weird grain that interferes with the chisel to go in. This final cut to the inside line is a practice of the real final cut on the outer line. And then, once there is a lot of cutout waste, cleaning inside helps with the visibility. When I finish cleaning up the mess, now it’s time to get the correct depth I want. I can’t work on the depth once I finalize the outer line because it may break the crisp outer line so here, I should try to get as clean of a bottom as possible. Like I said, I messed up the drill depth so I can’t get a flat
bottom… I wanted to do a perfect job to demonstrate but it happened…. Now I approach the final outline but here is the thing. 1/16” is too thick for my cheap chisel so I slice it only a half. And I always start my chisel from the inside corner to the out side so I can make a good reference line by the first ¼” of the cut. In addition, after the fiber cut, I also sliced the same amount on the side walls. This helps when working on the outside corner. The outside corner is the most difficult part so you should cut it very carefully and always approach to the corner when cutting across the grain. Now it looks good. This chisel can do the job. This is a final step. I chamfer the bottom edge of the bowtie. Please do not cut your finger when handling a small piece. Here’s an unusual process to the western wood working but I do Kigoroshi, which is compressing wood a little bit. I just lightly tap the bowtie with a hammer. It’ll be come back to the original size when it swells by glue moisture. As long as it fits in, you don’t have worry about if the bowtie actually gets bigger than the mortise with the moisture. The thing is, most of dried wood still contains 6-8% of moisture and it’ll be anyway gone and loose the density as time goes so that’s why you see some old joints have a gap but this Kigoroshi helps keep a tight joint for a long time. This has lots to do with grain orientations but maybe I’ll do another tip video if you like to watch my chisel session. Ok, you see me put a lot of glue and wiped it with a wet paper towel. I believe I was cleaning up the glue as well as feeding moisture to the bowtie to get it back to the original size. Now I gotta trim it. I see many people do a hand plane or flush cut by a saw and sand it when the glue is still wet but I don’t do it because I only have a wooden hand plane. So I usually wait for the glue to dry over night but this time, I only waited a few hours. I like to cut it with a flush trim saw but I don’t use it just in case you don’t have it so I just used a handplane and that’s it. Isn’t this tight? Anyways, how was it? Was it good that I should share more tips I researched and found in the past projects? or should I focus more on new projects? Please let me know. and I guess that’s it for today. Thank you so much for watching! I would be happy if you liked the video and happier if
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See you!
